Thirty hours in the subterranean slipstream felt like an eternity suspended outside of time.
Around the rushing fleet, the vertical walls of the ocean wept continuous veils of salt-foam that vaporized before touching the decks. The air inside the chasm was freezing and razor-sharp, smelling of ancient stone and the metallic tang of condensed gravity.
Malakor had not left Aurelia’s side for a single turn of the glass.
His boots remained wedged against the iron base of the foredeck capstan, his heavy arms encircling her waist from behind, his chin resting against the crook of her neck. Whenever the terrifying pressure of the eight spinning glyphs threatened to tear the breath from her lungs, his shadow-fire surged down their tether—a silent, immovable counterweight that grounded her divinity in mortal iron and blood.
On the twenty-ninth hour, the silver highway began to slope steeply upward.
Through the crystalline walls of the brine-canyon ahead, the dark, familiar contours of the western coastline emerged: the jagged black teeth of the Razorback Spine and the high white cliffs of the Bull-Horn Redoubt.
And across the mouth of the bay of Val-Khor, forty-eight colossal ironclads of the Eclipse Dynasty had formed a suffocating, crescent-shaped blockade.
Their black funnels were belching thick pillars of coal-smoke that choked the morning sky. Even from two leagues out, through the roaring walls of the sea, Aurelia could see the flashes of their heavy forward turrets bombarding the outer harbor forts. Great plumes of pulverized white granite and orange flame were leaping from the battlements of the Bull-Horn, where Dennis’s levies and the city garrison were desperately returning fire with their light shore ballistas.
"They've breached the outer boom," Malakor growled, his voice a low, vibrating snarl against her ear. His grip on her hip tightened, his knuckles white through his leather gloves. "The lower harbor is taking fire. Two galleys are burning by the salt-quays."
"They think our capital is defenseless," Aurelia whispered, her silver-violet eyes hardening into twin stars of lethal judgment.
She raised her ancestral blade, its steel catching the cold, subterranean light of the chasm.
"Let us show them what returns from the deep."
She channeled the Fifth and Eighth Relics—the crushing density of the bedrock and the primordial snap of the unmaking. With a sharp, upward flick of her wrist, she severed the gravitational tether holding the walls of the ocean apart.
Collapse.
The oceanic highway ended.
The five-league chasm closed with a cataclysmic roar that rattled the continental shelf. The displaced billions of tons of water surged upward in a colossal, hundred-foot tidal wave, carrying the ninety-two warships of the Vanguard out of the abyss on the crest of a mountainous wall of sapphire foam.
The Black Leviathan breached the surface of the bay like a sea-monster rising from the underworld.
The dragon-iron dreadnought crashed down into the inner channel with a concussive boom that sent a shockwave of boiling white water sweeping across the harbor. Behind it, the eleven star metal-plated dreadnoughts and eighty war-galleys dropped their towlines, fanning out into triple battle-echelons with the practiced, ruthless discipline of the Vanguard.
On the battlements of the Bull-Horn Redoubt, the frantic sound of garrison horns abruptly ceased.
Across the water, the crews of the Eclipse ironclads froze at their guns.
Aboard the enemy flagship, the massive Dread Sovereign, the heavy steam-whistles shrieked in bewildered panic as four dozen rotating turrets ground to a halt, their gun-crews staring in slack-jawed horror at the armada that had materialized from the middle of an unbroken sea.
Malakor threw his head back, letting out a savage, blood-curdling roar that was echoed instantly by four thousand shock-marines striking their boarding axes against their iron shields.
He wrenched his great sword from the deck, the dark steel erupting into a roaring pillar of black shadow-flame that scorched the morning mist away.
"Vespera!" Malakor’s voice thundered across the water through the flagship’s brass horn. "Ramming speed on the center! Full broadsides of void-shot! Leave not a single iron-rat alive in our bay!"
Aurelia stepped to the very tip of the dragon-iron bowsprit, the Eight Spheres around her throat flaring into a blinding halo of imperial fury that turned the morning sun to pale ash.
"Welcome to Val-Khor," Aurelia commanded the bay. "Open fire!"